For my 1000th entry, I got a little philosophical.

Why the Kondratieff hate? Why the hate about economic cycles in general?

To get you caught up a bit - Kondratieff was a Soviet economist, who came up with the idea that large economies 'cycle' over the space of several generations, generally on the order of 50, 60, 70 years. First you have a spring-like boom, then a summery plateau, then a fall-like stagflation, finally a wintery credit contraction and deflation.

The Kondratieff hate seems to be throughout the political and economic spectrum. Of course we all in the West would hate him because who wants to hear (and have to prepare) about recurring depressions? Bummer, so stick my fingers in my ears and say, 'la la la la'. But then Stalin had him killed, not because of the depression part (that fit well with what he hoped would happen to the West), but because of the spring renewal that came after. Kondratieff couldn't catch a break.

The rebuttal that I've been picking up is that Kondratieff was wrong because his timing was off - Great Depression +60 years fell in the mid-90s, so ha ha, schmuck, you're wrong. As a woman, an argument like that makes me laugh. Just because my period's late doesn't mean that periods don't exist.

And in general, it seems to me that social sciences in general have this personal attack component to them that the natural 'hard' sciences had lost centuries ago. Its one thing if you believe and can prove Freud's theories to be wrong, but then add to it the rumor that he molested his patients? Seems a bit over the top. Einstein proved that Newton's physics didn't explain many special situations in the universe, but that last I heard there were no hard personal feelings about the whole thing.

If we take Kondratieff's work as an hard-science-esque observation, I think the more interesting questions are: What is the underlying cause? Economies are created by people, after all, so is it a mechanical aspect like an underlying credit expansion and contraction? Or is it a more personal thing like subtle changes in the perception of risk, thereby causing more risky behavior? Does the cycle lengthen as the human lifespan lengthens? It seems like a leading coincidence that we are undergoing an eerie replay of the 30s, just as the first hand experience of the 30s is in the process of dying off.